Great moments in public-sector unionism

In Scranton, Pennsylvania, the police union has filed a grievance with the state collective bargaining board over a drug arrest made by police chief Dan Duffy in March, “because the chief is not a member of the collective bargaining unit and was ‘off duty’ when the March 20 arrest was made. ‘I think it’s absurd. I’m not going to turn my head on crime that takes place,’ Chief Duffy said. ‘I took the same oath (as a police officer) that everyone else took.'” [Times-Tribune via Taranto]

This is a great example of what happens when decent public-advancement groups complete their goals and continue to exist. Whether it’s a union or a Jesse Jackson group, once they achieve the objective, there’s nowhere else to go but to create issues that don’t exist, thereby making the organization a problem of equal mass of that of the original (but even harder to fix).

I’d bet real money the person arrested was related to or a friend of one of the other officers. It seems more like they are jealously guarding their power to selectively arrest non-violent crimes than some silly union grievance. Of course, I have no proof of that, or even a good reason to believe that beyond the history of stories in the past few years, in the age of policing’s “new professionalism”. It’s just me trying to make sense of this story.